I arrived in Norman,
Oklahoma, just in time to share a solemn ritual of the Platypus Workshop.
At a campus hangout called Mr. Bill's, 27 photographers and their instructors
were celebrating the halfway mark in their two-week long boot camp.
Deprived of sleep, overloaded with information, humiliated by their
initial efforts, and elated by their eventual success, they were, for
the moment, at one with the universe.

That oneness, supplemented
with food and beverage underwritten by Canon U.S.A., included a good
measure of video enlightenment. By the end of the first week, each of
the ten teams, consisting of two or three people, had completed a one-minute
video assignment. These short reports, well shot and nicely edited,
on small format digital video, by the newly hatched Platypi, proved
their ability to tell non-fiction video stories.

"This
is one of the best groups we have ever taught," Dirck Halstead
said in an email advisory from Oklahoma. "Reflecting the reach
of The Digital Journalist, nearly one third of our students come from
overseas. One of our scholarship students is a photographer from Central
African Press in Nairobi. We also have a high concentration of students
from Scandinavian countries."

Many were freelancers,
some were sent by their newspaper, and others were university students
or professors.

The following morning,
unable to ignore the dismaying worldwide decline of photojournalism,
Halstead told the troops, "Big changes are afoot; this is a very bad
time to be any kind of visual journalist." He encouraged the still photographers
in their efforts to become proficient in small format digital video
production.

With Platypus, the
furry egg-laying tangle of mammalian confusion, as a mascot, the message
is: become a hybrid, and let the others laugh at your strange little
camera; the duckbill will thrive.

Halstead offered
the first Platypus Workshop in 1999 to thirty photographers who were
not afraid to train in video. The workshop was conducted in Norman,
Oklahoma, coinciding with the yearly training of TV shooters offered
by the National Press Photographers Association. The NPPA TV NewsVideo
Workshop, known to many as simply, "The Workshop" is a six-day skills
course offered to television professionals.

The Platypus Workshop,
packed with video virgins, most of whom had never used a mini-DV camera,
ran twice as long, to accommodate the steep learning curve.

In launch year 1999,
the Platypus Workshop was tolerated as an ineffectual oddity by The
NPPA Workshop's broadcast staff and mainstream participants. The following
year, NPPA staffers began encouraging their students to check out the
inexpensive but user-friendly digital editing systems used by the Platypi.
This year, the fully enrolled Platypus Workshop was shown some respect
by the NPPA team--for both the camera and edit systems and the photographers
using them. John Premack, president and director of this year's shockingly
under-subscribed NPPA Workshop told his TV shooters, Ê"The empty
seats are a silent reminder of what's happening in our industry, of
cutbacks in television." Of Platypus, he said, "For them,
the future in now."

The future, indeed,
is in a transition driven by the economies and technologies of television
and the World Wide Web. Three years ago, it looked as if the dot.com
explosion would power the photojournalists of the future. This year,
TV pros, who never really bought into the dot.com frenzy in the first
place, have no clear expectations.

The prevailing wisdom
is: Everyone must be a producer, for television or new media. TV veterans
who merely shoot and edit will be dinosaurs, eating from the shrinking
food supply while it lasts. People who want to continue their careers
as storytellers will leave television. TV news and newspaper photography
will be entry-level jobs, low paying and dead end. Some broadcast stations
will drop out of the TV news business, and cable will fill the need.

"Cameraman"
and "cameraperson" are no longer the preferred terms for TV
shooters at the NPPA TV NewsVideo Workshop. In fact, being a shooting
specialist is seen as a liability. Now the participants are being trained
to be "story tellers."

The Platypus class
of 2001 grasped these concepts with ease. And, unlike the prior students,
this was the first group not intimidated by the shoot and edit hardware
and software. The teaching team of Rolf Behrens, from the TV news side
of the industry, and PF Bentley from the world of magazine photojournalism
(now a self-proclaimed Platypus) moved their students quickly through
the training.

The enrollees were
also in Norman with the purpose of making contacts and getting advice
to help them find outlets for their work.

Fritz Nordengren,
a multimedia producer, offered his suggestions during a special presentation
to the Platypus Workshop. Nordengren, who develops and creates traditional
and new media for non-profits, has an impressive background in the business
side of journalism that dovetails perfectly with his creative talent
in advertising, marketing, photography, and Web design.

His company, New
Media for Nonprofits (http://www.nmnp.org) designs media for major charities
that do medical relief work. "Find a cause you believe in," says Nordengren,
"and you are helping them with something they believe in."

Nordengren graduated
from the first Platypus Workshop in 1999, adding video storytelling
to his skills in Web design, still photography, radio, and brochure
design. He helps his clients select and create the appropriate format
for their message. This can be as simple as launching a website for
a Boy Scout troop, or as complex as providing streaming video for medical
charities, like "Operation Rainbow," that do relief work.

He emphasized the
importance of establishing a business relationship with the client.
"Nonprofit does not mean No Budget," he said, and cautioned workshop
members from working for free. At the very least, charge them fifty
bucks, he suggested.

Nordengren praised
the teams for taking two weeks of their time to travel to Oklahoma to
learn something new. "There are two kinds of people," he continued.
"The ones crying the blues, and the ones doing something about
it. You are a very unique group of people. Instead of saying, 'The sky
is falling!' you are taking a chance, taking a risk.... I hope you realize
you have what it takes to change the face of storytelling. You are the
visual journalists of the future."

He encouraged each
member of the Platypus class to choose a project and stay focused on
it. Find a story, think about who will benefit from that story, and
then contact those people and offer your services. Most nonprofits can
go directly to contributors who will write a check for a specific project.
"Don't give up!" said Fritz. "There will be a place for good content
and well-told stories." "And," he assured them, "The people in this
group are able to help you accomplish your goal."

The goals this year
were to tell stories from as far away as Uganda and Cambodia, to as
close by as the neighborhood animal shelter. Most of these stories can
be shot with a minimum of gear.

Reversing the model
of the burly TV cameraman with his large camera and overgrown lens,
the era of small and smaller has arrived. Network and cable television
executives have been signaling their acceptance of small digital video
cameras and inexpensive edit systems for the production of what some
call "non-scripted television." Memos have been circulated announcing
the projected demise of the 3-4 person TV crew and the emergence of
the crew of one. Expensive and bulky postproduction edit paks will give
way to inexpensive software loaded in PowerBooks.

Television reporters
better learn to shoot, caution these TV executives; while shooters and
audio technicians, on traditional TV crews, need to secure their futures
by learning to research and write.

"My camera
is smaller than your camera!" And furthermore, "my camera
bag is tinier than yours!" were the cries of the Platypus faculty
as they outdid one another proclaiming the virtues of simplicity. Faculty
members PF Bentley, Dirck Halstead, and Rolf Behrens demonstrated their
travel kits, emphasizing the importance of traveling light. Behrens,
co-producer of several ABC Nightline stories, says, "I reduce things
to the minimum. We've reached the stage where you can do it on your
own." The light DV equipment allows him to continue to shoot, after
back injuries prohibited him from hefting a traditional betacam. Halstead
concurred: "I've greatly reduced my gear, my kit." Although
he takes both still and video equipment on assignment, Halstead now
brings two bags and a small tripod, less gear than he used to bring
for his former still photography essays.

PF Bentley vividly
illustrated the value of portability with his hilarious description
of getting in and out of Cuba last year, while traveling alongside the
network television crews. PF was able to move and leave quickly with
his two cordura bags, while "The Crew," burdened with "The Crew Gear,"
typically packed into fourteen cases weighing several hundred pounds,
were delayed for hours by Cuban authorities.

PF needed only a
few minutes to demonstrate his kit. One bag holds his camera, portable
light and tripod. The other, carries batteries, microphones, some diffusion
filters and gels, a few clamps, cables, accessories, tape, and, we presume,
a Leica and a change of clothes.

The reverse boast
of "Mine is Smaller Than Yours," continued, during the first weekend
of the workshop, when Rolf Behrens and a television crew from Spanish-language
TV started comparing flashlights, to see whose light was the better
piece of equipment--providing low-light shooting--for its size. Small
and smaller.

The edit system
used at Platypus 2001 was, once again, the Apple Final Cut Pro software,
on the G4 computer. The program is extremely user-friendly and students
were able to begin simple edit projects almost immediately. Behrens,
a beta tester of Final Cut Pro, and a pioneer in its use for broadcast
television, uses the system on his G4 PowerBook.

The economies of
the mini-DV technology for shooting and editing reality television are
very impressive. But will the changeover from traditional media cause
the product to suffer? That's a question pondered by John Premack, the
NPPA president. Looking at the worldwide influx of brand new "visual
storytellers," some unskilled and untrained, Premack takes a historical
approach.

Premack experienced
the transition from news film to news tape in the middle 1970s and feels
that the first years of the change in news gathering technology were,
in fact, accompanied by a drop in quality. Some of the problems were
created by jurisdictional disputes between electronic technicians and
news film shooters. The techs had the background to guarantee the technical
quality of the video signal, but no training in journalism or broadcast
news. The newspukes had the know-how to cover a news assignment, but
struggled with the constant adjustment of the video signal needed to
keep the early ENG cameras within FCC specifications.

Ultimately, some
of the news film camera staff converted to electronic equipment, and
those technicians who were the most willing to learn the requirements
of TV news field production, endured. Eventually, the on-air quality
of television news tape rebounded.

At The Workshop
in Norman, senior faculty members discussed their hopes for new opportunities
to tell visual stories, and voiced their anxieties about the future
of good solid visual journalism. Two cameraman/directors on the NPPA
faculty, Darrel Barton and Bob Brandon, expressed their concern that
the market now requires more work for less pay, for content providers.

Premack forecasts
a future in which TV news will be shot and reported by entry-level personnel,
who will move up to management positions in television, or will leave
TV to pursue more gainful employment.

And what of the
others, the visual storytellers, steeped in journalism, conviction,
intelligence, and creativity?

For now, The Platypus
Workshop can only train and inspire them, and wait to see when and where
the work of One Storyteller With a Laptop and Two Itty Bitty Bags will
hit your monitor screen.